Documentary Film

Life After Life: The Greeks of Istanbul

Life After Life is the story of the historic Rum (Greek) population of Istanbul, told through personal stories and community life. The latent force of historic state persecution – ruinous taxes and forced labour for religious minorities, the 1955 Pogrom, and the 1964 expulsions of Greeks – shape the worlds of memory in which community members live. The film is about what it means to live with the past in the present, and how people make their peace and new hope from a community memory of loss, displacement and difficulty. 

Tanaş is the last surviving Rum in his Istanbul neighbourhood of Paşabahçe. He visits the vast ‘Red Castle’ Greek School, prominent on the Istanbul skyline but little-known. The School continues to be a keystone of the community, even though only about fifty students attend today due to depopulation. His own former classmates were displaced to Athens, and they still meet there together every Wednesday. Stelios is a choirmaster who sings at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul. We follow his return to his ancestral home on the island of Gökçeada (Imroz), now part of Turkey but with a deep history of Greek inhabitance. There he teaches children music and takes part of the revival of the Rum community whose abandoned houses still dot the landscape. Dimitri lives in Athens, expelled from Istanbul as a boy with his parents in 1964. In the film, we follow his efforts to honour his parents’ wishes to rebury their bones in the Rum cemetery in Istanbul, alongside the bodies of their parents and ancestors. 

These stories are interwoven with the reflections of other community members on the ambiguities of belonging, the power of place, and the persistence and survival of community and culture. Life After Life is part of an ethnographic research project by Dr Gonul Bozoğlu to understand the ways in which historical events impact the experiences of the Rum communities, both in the Athens diaspora and in the much-diminished population that has remained in Istanbul and give voice to community members. 

The film with English subtitles

The film with Greek subtitles

Some images from the documentary film, along with a screenshot from ERTFLIX, part of the Greek national broadcaster, showing that the film was available for streaming for several years (top left). The film has been screened at festivals and public events in Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, and Australia.